Help! ​I Ride My Bike Every Day and I Still Can’t Lose Weight

Struggling with your weight loss goals? You are not alone. The blunt truth is that though daily exercise like cycling will improve your cardiovascular health, lift your mood, and boost your fitness, you can easily pedal an hour a day and not lose a pound. As many people notice to their dismay, you might even gain a few.

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Training more but gaining weight? This might be why:

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“Just adding exercise does not equal automatic weight loss,” says Leslie Bonci, MPH, RD, sports nutritionist at Pittsburgh-based Active Eating Advice and co-author of Bike Your Butt Off. “You need to be sure you’re not unconsciously eating more, not overcompensating with treats and sweets, and that you’re exercising in a way that encourages fat loss and builds lean muscle tissue.”

Don’t get discouraged (or hang up your wheels!). It’s not as complicated as it sounds. With the right adjustments to your riding (and fueling) routine, you canpedal off unwanted pounds. Here’s what you need to know:

All Weight Is Not Created Equal

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First things first. The numbers on the scale tell you one thing: your weight. They don’t tell you what that weight comprises. Though cycling won’t add as much muscle as strength training, if you’re riding regularly enough to have telltale cycling quads, then you’ve put on muscle. You only have to feel your muscles to know that muscle is firm, dense tissue (fat, by contrast, is softer and takes up more space). When you add lean muscle tissue, even if you’ve lost some fat, your clothes will fit better, but the numbers on the scale may barely budge—or even seemingly go in the “wrong” direction. Your weight is also influenced by your hydration and glycogen storage, so you’ll naturally see your weight fluctuate day by day—even from morning to afternoon to night—so it’s important to keep those numbers in perspective.

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What You Eat Matters—a Lot

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A moderate hour-long spin may burn about 500 calories, depending on your size. Follow it up with a couple of slices of pizza and the ride is effectively erased from a caloric standpoint. Although many factors, including your genes, determine how you will lose weight in response to exercise, a good rule of thumb is weight loss is about 75 percent what you eat and 25 percent the exercise you do. Just as you need to add structure to your exercise routine to see results, a little structure goes a long way in improving your eating—and weight loss—says Bonci.

“Stop grazing,“ she says. ”It only encourages overeating. Eat three meals that are satisfying enough that you can go four to five hours until you eat again. Portion your plate so you have half your calories from vegetables and fruits, a quarter from complex carbs, and a quarter from lean protein. Top with healthy fat like nuts, avocado, or olive oil.”

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Huff and Puff Your Fat Away

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Fascinating fact: You excrete lost fat through your lungs. Sounds bizarre, but research shows that the process of losing fat involves metabolizing the triglycerides you have stored in your fat cells. As you know, you burn fat through oxidation (that’s why aerobic exercise is fat burning). You exhale the waste product (carbon dioxide) as you breathe. Though that’s an extreme simplification of the process, it’s a good visual reminder that pushing the pace enough to be breathing hard will help you lose fat.

Rides that include short, intense efforts (aka, high intensity interval training or HIIT) are scientifically proven fat burners. In a well-cited head-to-head comparison, researchers from University of Western Ontario found that riders performing four to six 30-second full throttle sprints three times a week burned more than twice as much body fat as riders who rode for 30 to 60 minutes at a moderate, aerobic intensity. Include HIIT training in your rides twice a week.

Time Your Fueling to Tame Your Appetite

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This is a big one. “Riders trying to lose weight will often not eat before or after a ride because they want to burn fat and lose weight,” says Bonci. “Problem is that nearly always leads to overeating at some point later in the day.” Instead, time your regular food intake to fuel your ride. For instance, if you’re riding midday, split your lunch in half. Have half your sandwich a half an hour before you go out and eat the rest when you’re done. You can do the same with breakfast. If you’re riding longer and/or harder, take food with you, so you can eat about 200 calories an hour while you ride. Have a small recovery bite like a glass of chocolate milk and a few almonds when you’re done to refuel, then eat as usual for the rest of the day.

Muscle up Your Metabolism

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Cycling builds some muscle (see: calves and quads), but it’s not enough to offset the general muscle loss that happens over time. Losing muscle hurts your metabolism—and makes it difficult to lose or even maintain body weight—and also limits the amount of power you can put into your pedals (to burn even more calories and fat). The solution is strength training. Lift weights two to three days a week to build lean muscle tissue, which will not only make you faster and stronger on your bike, but also is more metabolically active so you will use more energy all day long.

Keep Your Body Guessing

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Your body adapts to what you ask it to do—that’s training. If you always do the same thing, it will adapt and your progress will pretty much stall out where you are. Change it up to keep making progress and lose unwanted weight. Look at your weekly rides and plan for each one to be a bit different from the rest. Go long one day; hit the hills another; include steady efforts where you’re working for 15 to 20 minutes at “race pace” (or right where you can just speak a few words at a time) in another. This strategy trains all your energy systems, so your body has to keep adapting and you avoid plateaus.

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